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Agriculture/Forestry Task Force Meeting, Floyd, CO. Wed. July 20, 2011.
I’ve assembled a very broad but not necessarily comprehensive picture of agriculture in Floyd County’s past
and will close, if time permits, with some very specific figures from the agricultural census of 1940, which
reported on the harvest of 1939 and on the farm holdings of cattle, buildings, machinery, as they were in the
first half of 1940.
The first people in Floyd County, Native Americans, were farmers. Eastern Woodland tribes like the
Cherokee grew beans, corn, and squashes. But while there is abundant evidence of hunting and frequent passage
through the county in our creek and river bottoms, I’m not aware of much evidence of long term settlement
consistent with intensive agriculture. I’ll leave it to someone better qualified to discuss Native American
agriculture as it was practiced in this area, but can say a little about the influence they had on the Europeans
who succeeded them on this land.
By the time serious settlement began here in the late 1700s most native people had been pushed west of
the Blue Ridge so that there was relatively little interaction between white settlers and Native Americans. But
most of the European settlers, primarily Scots Irish and Germans, who came this way had been in the colonies
for a couple of generations and were well acquainted with domestic and wild plants cultivated and gathered by
Native Americans. By the mid 1700s overcrowding and rising land prices in PA were pushing these people
southward and westward down the Valley of Virginia. Once British treaties with the Cherokee were undone by
American independence, whites moved rapidly west and north over and beyond the Blue Ridge, where, isolated
from Piedmont and coastal resources and habits, they became even more dependent upon plants like beans and
corn, which was initially called Indian Corn to distinguish it from wheat and other small grains settlers brought
with them from the old world. As used in England in colonial times, “corn” referred to wheat. They had also
become familiar with the uses of some of the roughly 400 wild plants the Cherokee used as sources of both food
and medicine.
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The nuclear family was the fundamental social and economic unit, and how much a farm could produce
was tied directly to the number of children or extended family members available to help with chores and field
work. The sharp decline in family sizes after about1940, in contrast to the baby boom of mainstream America,
coincided with the rapid decline in subsistence farming that was a major consequence of the cash-based
industrial economy ushered in by employers like the RAAF, Burlington Mills in Radford, and similar large
scale manufacturing concerns in counties surrounding Floyd.
In northern and central Appalachia, where the presence of coal and large tracts of big timber created
non-farm, wage paying jobs development of an industrial, cash based economy, subsistence multi-crop farming
began to decline soon after the civil war, as land was bought up by outside developers and people abandoned
farming in favor of hourly wages. In places like Floyd County which had neither coal nor big timber, nor a river
big enough to power a textile mill or smooth enough to navigate, nor any resource anyone wanted badly enough
to send a railroad to get it, the family-centered, farming-based, cash-poor economy lasted well into the 20th
Century, perhaps into the 1930s. Our greatest resource, people, could leave the county on their own, and they
were doing it in droves around 1900. Some went to the mines and shipyards and steel mills, but a good number
also went to the farms in the Midwest, or to places like Loudon County, VA, where land was flatter and markets
for farm products nearer. Some stayed, some came home, and few even brought people back with them. The
Cox brothers brought home a friend from Illinois, a Mr. Wurzburger, who eventually proposed to their sister.
She was hesitant at first because of the extra time and ink she would afterward need to sign her name, but
accepted after considering that odds were pretty good that she would end up marrying a Hollandsworth or a
Quesenberrry if she rejected Mr. Wurzburger.
For those who remained or returned, farming continued to be the main occupation for most and an
essential sideline for many people with other occupations, like blacksmiths, weavers, millers, distillers,
storekeepers, wool carders, preachers, and teachers. Small grains, mostly wheat, oats, rye, and buckwheat
(which is not wheat or even a grain) continued to be staples, as they had been throughout the 19th century. The
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Products of Industry report compiled along with the 1870 census included figures supplied by the owners of 37
of the most productive mills in Floyd County. Collectively they took in over 74 thousand bushels of corn, rye,
wheat, and buckwheat. While all these grains could feed humans and animals, the single most important annual
crop was corn thanks to a remarkable set of virtues and wide range of uses. There are few ironies in American
history as great as our collective failure to fully appreciate corn. Instead of being mildly insulting, to be referred
to as corny should be a great compliment.
This is the soapbox portion of my talk, but it won’t last long. I’ll just say that instead of simply
consuming the various types of corn boiled, roasted, steamed, fried, baked, popped, or pickled, we squander
more and more of the energy in contains by turning it into beef, chicken, pork, and now gasoline. We do need
the protein and the octane, but there must be other good ways to get both.
No other food is thought of as both a grain and a vegetable, and few if any other is as prolific in either
role. A single grain yields at least one ear of corn, which can bear several hundred grains. Imagine putting a
dollar in the bank in April and getting back 500 in September. The flaw, of course, in such a fabulous return is
that if everyone else can do the same thing, dollars or corn quickly declined in value.
No other grain is as patient as corn. Wheat must be harvested within a window of a couple of weeks. Cut
too soon, it will fail to form fully ripened grains. Left too long, the stalks collapse and lodge on the ground, or
the overripe grain shatters and is lost in the process of harvesting. An ear of corn, left on the standing stalk
simply pivots downward, turning its shuck into an umbrella, and waits for someone to come and collect it. If cut
and bundled in sturdy dry shocks, it can wait even longer if mice or squirrels don’t get there first.
Many farmers grew enough wheat to last more than one year, but corn was always planted because
everything ate corn. Horses, cattle, hogs, chickens, ducks, children ate corn. Dogs ate corn bread. As far as I
know, cats DON’T eat corn, but mice eat corn and cats eat mice.
One disadvantage to corn, compared to small grains like wheat and rye, etc, which are so thickly drilled or
broadcast that weeds are smothered, is the requirement of intensive cultivation. Before herbicides and sod
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planting, most farmers cultivated and hoed it at least three times, and much of their summers, and their summers
of all those children were spent in the cornfield. I have calculated that an acre of corn grown in rows three feet
apart, as it was before cheap chemical fertilizers, and cultivated three times, would require 40 miles of walking,
whether behind a horse or with hoe in hand, merely to bring it to the point where it could be cut and shocked.
The long growing season of traditional open-pollinated varieties of like heel tap and hickory king and
southern white dent required that they be planted when oak leaves were as big as squirrels’ ears, when dogwood
was blooming, and to insure maturity before an early frost field corn needed to be PAUSE for AUDIENCE-Knee high before the fourth of July.
It was difficult to have much fun hoeing corn, but corn shucking at least was a social event, and
sometimes included a corn product that was valuable and relatively easy to transport.
Snapshot of Floyd County agriculture in 1940, a date that is significant for two reasons:
1) The first is coincidence. The complete returns for the agricultural census are in McConnell Library at
Radford University. Library holdings of both the agricultural and industrial censuses tend to be erratic.
2) More importantly, in 1940 Floyd County, and other Appalachian counties where there was neither coal nor
large tracts of old growth timber to attract outside investment, were on the verge of much fuller, delayed
integration into the industrial economy. In the 1930s, most Floyd Countians were still farmers, even if they had
other jobs. School teachers were farmers. Preachers were farmers. The end of the Great Depression and the
onset of World War II especially took many men and women out of the county and showed them different ways
to live and make a living. People who stayed in the county were being exposed to new opportunities, points of
view, and choices. By the end of the 1940s, electricity was available to most people. Radios and phonograph
record players, luxuries only a decade before, were common. Many more people had automobiles to get them to
and from jobs outside the county, jobs that at first supplemented farm income and eventually replaced it for
many who had continued to farm as much from habit as personal interest.
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For the first time since, perhaps, the 1910s, an individual’s time and labor were valuable. In 1938, an
experienced farm hand could earn 10 cents an hour working for a neighbor on a farm, and might have to take
his pay in produce or an exchange of labor instead of cash. By 1942, an unskilled laborer could earn 40 cents an
hour, four times as much, at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant.
I have provided too little context and too few points for serious comparison between agriculture as it is
in Floyd County today and as it was practiced here seventy years ago. I offer these facts and figures only as an
illustration of how deeply involved in agriculture our county was only 70 years ago, within the lifetimes of
many people still living today.
One of the few characteristics of the county that hasn’t been turned upside down since 1940 is the area,
and even that appears to have changed more than you might think. Today Floyd County claims an area of 381
square miles, or 243,840 acres. In 1939 the Bureau of the Census credited us with 245,120 acres. Whether this
apparent loss of nearly 13 hundred acres is due to better methods of surveying or continental drift we don’t
know, but I would like to pursue this topic for a minute for this reason: If we had that land today in a good
location it would be worth about 6.5 million dollars. However it got away from us, we’ve lost 6,195,200 square
yards of land, which works out to 88,503 square yards per year or 243 square yards a day in the 70 plus years
since 1940. It might be worth our time to study the reports of neighboring counties. If any have gained more
than a few acres since 1940 and we need to be asking them some questions.
In the meantime, we’ll return to 1940, bearing in mind that I have purposely selected from among
dozens of pages of statistics examples that show how important farming was to Floyd County in the summer
and fall of 1939, when the crops reported in the 1940 census were harvested. I have left out far more than I’ve
included, but it requires no exaggeration or manipulation of the facts to show just how deeply involved in
agriculture Floyd County was within living memory. But I remind you that facts taken out of context can be
misleading. You’ll want to do a little more research before you run home and plow up the back yard. It’s
already too late to sow winter wheat, and nothing else will be hurt by delaying another week or two.
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Collectors of the 16th Census of the United States in the year 1940 tabulated in Floyd County 2,281
farms, accounting for 85 percent of the county’s area. Only two of Virginia’s 100 counties, Halifax, with 91.5
% of its acreage in farms and Pittsylvania, with 85.2%, had a higher percentage of land classified as farm land.
Mecklenberg was tied with Floyd at 85%.
The information immediately following has no point other than to illustrate the variety and amounts of
agricultural production in 1939, reported in early 1940. Some of the figures seem to me outrageous, but it seems
likely that people would, if anything, under-report production since no one wants to look too successful or
productive to the Federal government. I can’t substantiate these numbers, but here they are:
In 1939 288,000 lbs of butter were churned on Floyd County farms. That’s 144 tons of butter. 2,294,000
gallons of whole milk were produced. When the census takers visited Floyd County farms in 1940 there were
3,719 hogs in the county and 85,000 chickens. Two thousand farms, virtually every farm in the county, reported
total production of 667,000 dozen eggs. I did look twice at that number, but it works out to only 94 eggs in the
course of a year, only one every 3.8 days, for each of those 85,000 chickens. There were 1,012 hives of bees on
254 farms. 1,837 farms produced, collectively, 288,000 bushels of corn on 11,000 acres. Only 6 of those
11,000 acres were harvested for silage, with the remainder apparently cut, shocked, and shucked, probably
mostly by hand. 927 farms produced 56,000 bushels of winter wheat.
Our farmers grew 55,000 bushels of Irish potatoes, for home consumption and for sale.
760 farms, the third highest number in the state, reported growing vegetables expressly for sale including
cabbage, onions, peas, and over 18,000 bushels of tomatoes. 513 Floyd County farms planted 963 acres in snap,
string, and wax beans and produced an unstated number of bushels valued at $32,136. By comparison, all 100
VA counties combined grew a little less than 6,000 acres. In only one county did more farms grow green beans
for sale, and only five counties produced a crop of greater value. The entire state of West Virginia planted only
1,400 acres of snap, string, and wax beans compared to Floyd County’s 963.
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Much of the tomato and green bean crop was canned right here in the county in family run canneries set
up in modified out buildings or purpose built canneries. Farm families signed contracts with wholesalers who
supplied cans, can sealers, labels, cartons, and sometimes seeds, and delivered sealed cans at the agreed upon
rate. Quality control was limited to an unobtrusive identifying number stamped on the paper label.
501 farms produced 46,000 lbs. of cherries. 701 farms grew 85,000 lbs of grapes. 1,657 farms harvested
148,478 bushels of apples. Varieties are unspecified but these no doubt included varieties favored for cooking,
eating, drying, and making apple butter and apple sauce. Ben Davis joke?? Come back to it if there is time.
Notable among crops that Floyd Countians didn’t tackle are canteloupes, cucumbers, and watermelons, with
only a single farm reporting growing each of these for sale.
The crop in which Floyd was truly outstanding has, to my knowledge, completely disappeared from our
fields, at least as a regular crop. In 1939 Floyd County grew 25,000 bushels of buckwheat. Neighboring Carroll
County grew 25, 601. Their combined total of over 50,000 bushels made up nearly half the state total of
117,000 acres. Bath County ran a distant third place with only 15,000 bushels.
If we have time, I’ll say more about buckwheat. If not, look into it on your own. It’s a pretty remarkable
plant, and one peculiarly suited to the depleted, acidic soils of 1939 Floyd County.
The utter disappearance of buckwheat from Floyd County fields, and its rarity on our breakfast tables
marks a distinct change in our eating habits. An even more striking reversal, a switch from the poor man’s pork
to the rich man’s beef, is suggested by statistics having to do with their production and consumption. In 1939
745 farms SOLD 4,087 head of cattle. 579 farms sold 7,656 hogs and pigs, a little less than twice the number
cattle sold.
The numbers related to home butchering rather than sale are far more striking in their suggestion of very
different eating habits. Of the 2,281 farms reporting any agricultural production, all but about 200 reported
butchering cattle and/or hogs. Of those 2,081 farms on which farm animals were butchered, all but TWO,
(2,079 farms) butchered at least one hog, for a countywide total of 6,383. Fewer than 300 cattle and calves were
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butchered in the same 12 months. Since pork was far easier, in that pre-refrigeration era, to preserve with salt
(hams, bacon, middlings) or a variety of spices (sausage) for future sale or trade, we can’t know exactly how
much of either meat, beef or pork, was actually eaten, but the preference for pork, which gained weight faster,
and can be more fully used up as a source of food, grease, and lard, is inescapable. To my knowledge, no bar
has ever offered its patrons pickled cows feet, nor has any folk festival served up beef chitterlings.
Along with major changes since the 1940s, some things have lasted into the 21st Century. Some people
still pick berries and gather grapes and other wild foods. The first time I cooked for my future wife I served her
plantain from the meadow by my house. She told her mother I had cooked weeds for her. But vegetable
gardening, while still strong, as a universal practice is declining. Two job families with fast food close by know
how to garden, but can’t find the time and aren’t driven by the vague fear that push children of the depression to
put out more than they can harvest and harvest more than they can put away and put away more than they can
eat or give away. If the next 70 years are as interesting as the last, who knows what the county will look like.